Original Story - Epic Games has taken Fortnite Battle Royale offline this morning, however, the server downtime players are currently experiencing is a quick patch expected to fix a few emergency bugs in the game.

Why else would Epic rush it out first thing in the morning.

However, coming later today is the as planned content update for the game, which most fans had been expecting to drop along with a few new features.

The official Fortnite Twitter account also confirmed this yesterday, telling fans:

What's in today's new 5.40 Update?

The biggest addition we know about is the inclusion of a new weapon for the game; the suppressed assault rifle for the Battle Royale players.

This in itself would be enough cause for celebration. However, the small tease released by Epic Games may be hinting at the possible inclusion of a much bigger in-game feature.

Fans have noticed, on much closer inspection, that the teaser image for the new weapon appeared to show a sort of camo skin on the gun. Which is most unusual.

Some players have taken this to mean that the game could be set to introduce weapon skins to the game.

Weapon skins are not traditionally part of the game, but they were teased in the most recent update to the game, as discovered by dataminers.

EPIC GAMES

(Pic: EPIC GAMES)

Most sites, including ourselves, at first believed that weapon skins - along with other new discoveries such as references to Pets and a music packs section - were features which might arrive in the game along with Season 6.

However, maybe we were wrong. Maybe weapon skins are coming before the big season refresh.

Elsewhere, we should see the usual array of bug fixes for the game.

Usually, a quick look at the games Trello board would indicate what bugs are being worked on currently, but it's looking rather, empty, at the moment.

Save for one issue, Save The World issue which is marked as fixed in the next release.

This is related to the “the "Keen Eyes" perk which is apparently not lighting up loot / treasure chests on the map.

Likewise, this isn't to say it will definitely be fixed, but there's a solid chance.

“We've been hard at work trying to finalise custom bindings for our controller users and Edit will be an action that you'll be able to bind by itself without having to hold a button.

“With that being said, u/EpicDustyDevo and I have been thinking through how to get the edit action faster, since it's become an issue and we've run out of buttons.

“I think we have something that will make everyone happy, even those who aren't going to do custom bindings will still benefit from it.”

“The edit hold timing is currently 0.25s. We've made a change internally to reduce that to 0.15s for the Builder Pro configuration.

“We've also reduced Old School, Quick Builder, and Combat Pro to 0.2s. Once this goes out, we'll have to ability to hotfix the value and tune it in case it's too fast and is causing accidental editing.”

The Redditor and Epic employee added: “Finally, we know it's taken a long time to get custom bindings out there but bear with us.

“Unfortunately, it's not a easy thing to go from not having custom bindings to then creating the system to have custom bindings.

“We do have amazing talent here at Epic that make things look easy sometimes, but something that changes inputs into our game shouldn't be rushed. I hope you understand.”